I was invited by Digital Marketing Summit 2023 to moderate a fireside chat between two customer experience professionals. They are Jonah Hong, Corporate Vice President and Head of Digital Customer Experience at the Hyundai Motor Group and Dan Gingiss, the author of the Experience Maker.
Digital Marketing Summit 2023
Jonah Hong highlighted bitter patience. He introduced the challenges that Hyundai Motor Group faces. “To address different customers with different tastes and preferences, we have to create tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of personalized content for a vehicle. To do this globally, organizations have to exchange data each other in the short term and we have to go beyond functional organizations in the long term. To do this work dynamically, automatically, and in real time, investments had to be made in technology.”
Digital Marketing Summit 2023
Dan Gingiss emphasized sweet fruit. In the conversation, he elaborated a wide variety of real life examples in which people spent more and they recommended a company more strongly when the company delivered superior experience to customers. His examples clarifies that having a positive customer experience values more than consuming a high-performing product.
Contemporary electronic manufacturers struggle with how to develop attractive bundles by combining their existing smart products. In the present work, we propose Goal Based Bundling (GBB) by drawing on the academic research of goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018) and shed light on two previously ignored aspects of bundling strategy: service and glue product. We applied our GBB to a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics, whose goal was to develop new product bundles for kids by combining multiple smart home products. We constructed a framework of Samsung Electronics’ smart products and then visualized it on its sales website. A UI design conveying the value of smart products bundle was developed based on GBB structure. We discuss the process and the result of our project to provide insights into the product managers who combine existing smart products to develop a bundle.
“Although bundling tactics are frequently called upon in business, marketing research on product bundles is surprisingly sparse (Russell et al., 1999). This paper represents an attempt to identify bundling smart products by borrowing the key concepts from the Goal Systems Theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018). We posit that constructing a products bundle following a hierarchical goal structure overcomes the limitation of combining categorically dissimilar products. Moreover, it addresses an important role of service in smart product bundling.” (pg. 2898)
I was invited by Contents Marketing Summit 2022 to help two professionals share their insights about marketing trends and activities in the age of customer experience. The two professionals are Hyewon Oh, Director of Brand Communication at HE Division, LG Electronics and Ginny Lee, Head of Sports Marketing and Key City Brand Activation at Adidas. They both have 20+ year work experience in the marketing field.
Customer eXperience (CX) matters significantly in Korea because product-based differentiation is challenging more than ever and people strive to experience something new. The invited two professionals introduced several interesting projects and provided participants with fresh insights.
First, LG Electronics is now running a pop-up store called “Geumseong (Goldstar) Recreational Room.” People could play video games with the high-end OLED TVs, having gaming experience. It is also collaborating with world-class artists such as Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor at the Freeze Art Fair in London and LA, Saatchi Gallery, and Venice Biennale at the same time. While introducing these activities, Director Oh highlighted that only persistent activities work out.
Second, Adidas Korea is running various activities to directly participating in numerous customers, from city tours with Son Heung-min to CSR running events all over the city. Marketer Oh emphasized that in order to engage customers, activities should be designed to give chances for customers to participate in special experience.
They both concluded that commercial impact of marketing activities in the CX era is difficult to be measured in a short run. CX marketers need to be persistent and participatory.
Wearing a mask becomes common as the spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus disease) dominates our lives. However, people find it difficult to breathe with a mask. I recently found an interesting new product for masks at Granhand where I visited to buy droppers or incenses for my office.
Though you can not seize nor hold the smell, it has a decisive effect on the matter of our memory and emotion and believes on its vitally of influences on our decision among our lives. GRANHAND gives faith towards the value of the fragrance and consistently pursues to make the scent part of our regular living. Although it may be slow nor has perfection, the variety of contents that our brand is offering will build the unique value of the experience that no other brand will possess. GRANHAND will not be a product where it vanishes with ease nor be neglected. It will continuously illuminate with a distinct presence and yield to warm people’s mind.
This store sells a natural oil named as “On Your Mask.” When we spray it inside the mask, we could breathe in a fresh way. This oil impressed me a lot because when I think about a mask in the past, I paid attention exclusively to its practical functionality. In other words, I simply ignored how much comfortable I should feel when wearing it.
Customer experience is not dried up for new product development.
A common approach to innovation, parallel search, is to identify a large number of opportunities and then to select a subset for further development, with just a few coming to fruition. One potential weakness with parallel search is that it permits repetition. The same, or a similar, idea might be generated multiple times, because parallel exploration processes typically operate without information about the ideas that have already been identified. In this paper we analyze repetition in five data sets comprising 1,368 opportunities and use that analysis to address three questions: (1) When a large number of efforts to generate ideas are conducted in parallel, how likely are the resulting ideas to be redundant? (2) How large are the opportunity spaces? (3) Are the unique ideas more valuable than those similar to many others? The answer to the first question is that although there is clearly some redundancy in the ideas generated by aggregating parallel efforts, this redundancy is quite small in absolute terms in our data, even for a narrowly defined domain. For the second question, we propose a method to extrapolate how many unique ideas would result from an unbounded effort by an unlimited number of comparable idea generators. Applying that method, and for the settings we study, the estimated total number of unique ideas is about one thousand for the most narrowly defined domain and greater than two thousand for the more broadly defined domains. On the third question, we find a positive relationship between the number of similar ideas and idea value: the ideas that are least similar to others are not generally the most valuable ones.
Script is a stereotyped sequence of activities. A good example of the script is for restaurant dining. We are greeted by a server who guides to a table, we receive a menu from a server, and the server takes our orders. Drinks arrive first and then meals arrive. When we finish meals, we pay the bill at the cashier and leave the restaurant.
Marketers and designers use scripts to improve customer experience. We often assume the fewer activities customers perform in the restaurant, the more they are satisfied. Therefore, we hire more part-time servers. Alternatively, we try to design an unmanned store by installing vending machines or robots to automatize in-store activities.
Different from our assumptions, however, restaurant customers could be happy about doing everything by themselves. I found this when I met a friend at one of the Rainmaking cafe in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rainmaking is a corporate innovation and venture development firm.
When I entered the cafe, a refrigerator greeted me. No one was inside. I soon realized I should do everything by myself in this cafe. I picked up a beverage, paid it using my mobile phone, grabbed a table with my friend, and then cleaned up the table when leaving.
The whole experience did not bother me. It was rather pleasant. Everyone else seemed to follow this convention. This self-service cafe could be an alternative to automatization. Although many owners want vending machines or robots to make their stores unmanned or intact, many customers like me might be willing to do everything by themselves in stores.
***
Reference
Patricia M. West, Dan Ariely, Steve Bellman, Eric Bradlow, Joel Huber, Eric Johnson, … David Schkade. (1999). Agents to the Rescue?Marketing Letters, 10(3), 285–300.
The advent of electronic environments is bound to have profound effects on consumer decision making. While the exact nature of these influences is only partially known it is clear that consumers could benefit from properly designed electronic agents that know individual users preferences and can act on their behalf. An examination of the variousroles agents perform is presented as a framework for thinking about the design of electronic agents. In addition, a set of goals is established that include both outcome-based measures, such as improving decision quality, as well as process measures like increasing satisfaction and developing trust.
I recently traveled by Air Canada from Incheon (Seoul) to Vancouver and then to Toronto. I spent 9 hours in a new airplane (Being 788 Dreamliner) and then 4 more hours in an old one (Airbus 320). In two airplanes, I watched same movies and listened to same music to learn a commonality and several differences of the personal touch-screen TV systems.
As for the commonality, the in-flight entertainment systems embedded in two airplanes are controlled by touch. They have no wired/wireless controllers to select a program or to change the brightness or volume. Although touch is popular, a passenger behind me kept pressing his/her screen firmly and moving my headrest. Therefore, “minimizing the number of touching activities” will be critical in enhancing my own entertainment experience as well as improving the in-flight experience of the passenger sitting in front of me.
*Old*
As for the differences, I found two things that make the new system better than the old one. First, the new system has a better User Interface (UI or layout) than the old one. In the new system, I was able to store individual programs (e.g., movie, tv, and music) and then bring them up to play while enjoying other programs. For instance, while I was watching a movie, I could pause it and then call and listen to the music I stored in advance. In the old system, I completely stopped playing one program to enjoy another one and, more importantly, doing so needs many, many touches. Further, the new system has a new drop-down menu at the top which helped me navigate the programs.
Second, the new system provides a better Customer Experience (CX) than the old one. The new system has a simpler, darker background and thus the information and programs are clear. Adding to that, “a small airplane marker in the bottom” at the new system showed how much more to go to the destination. In the old system, I had no idea how many hours were left and, to quench this curiosity, I should have pressed a lot of buttons. More importantly, the new system responded to my touch faster and more accurately than the old one.
In goal-oriented services, consumers want to get transported from one well-defined state (start) to another (destination) state without much concern for intermediate states. A cost-based evaluation of such services should depend on the total cost associated with the service-i.e., the price and the amount of time taken for completion. In this paper, we demonstrate that the characteristics of the path to the final destination also influence evaluation and choice. Specifically, we show that segments of idle time and travel away from the final destination are seen as obstacles in the progress towards the destination, and hence lower the choice likelihood of the path. Further, we show that the earlier such obstacles occur during the service, the lower is the choice likelihood. We present an analytical model of consumer choice and test its predictions in a series of experiments. Our results show that in choosing between two services that cover the same displacement in the same time (i.e., identical average progress), consumer choice is driven by the perception of progress towards the goal (i.e., by virtual progress). In a final experiment, we show that the effects of virtual progress may outweigh the effects of actual average progress.
Like me, people may like a brand more strongly when they happen to know the story behind the brand. Here, the story behind the brand could be about how an advertisement was shoot like NTT DoCoMo. Alternatively, it could be about how the product was manufactured like Apple Watch Gold.
Or, the story behind the brand could even be the information about the person who started a winery and raised grapes. One study showed that people are confident and more likely to buy a wine when they read the name of the wine maker on its back label.
I believe a story behind the brand could be anything like a simple marketing process. When consumers are exposed to this kind of story about a brand, they will like the brand more, in particular, when its quality is difficult to be judged (e.g., wine, painting, quilt, cheese).
This paper investigates whether including authentic information on the back labels of wine bottles enhances consumers’ confidence and purchase intentions about wine; it also assesses the moderating role of involvement and knowledge about wine. We conducted two experimental studies. Study 1 generated three findings. First, when the back label had authentic information, subjects showed higher confidence levels. Second, this effect was hold for subjects with low levels of involvement. Finally, we did not observe this effect for subjects with high levels of involvement. Study 2 extended study 1’s findings and identified the moderated mediation effect of confidence. The findings highlight the important impact on wine choice of authentic information. However, the findings also suggest that authentic information may not be sufficient to attract people with high levels of involvement and knowledge. This study’s findings provide wine producers with practical marketing insights.
Appendix 2a. Experimental stimuli for study 2-Label Grape.
Appendix 2a. Experimental stimuli for study 2-Label Authentic.
